"I had a few minutes to burn today, so I did what I'm sure you were doing: I read the Oracle Enterprise Linux Services Agreement. It's funny what you find when you start digging around in the legalese that governs the Big Announcement that Oracle made. It makes 'Unbreakable Linux' look a little flimsy."

Open Source developers. and specially volunteer ones, can´t affor such a legal team to be safe, there lies the attack to OSS at a world wide level.

Also, people get´s concerned and will tend (like in ´feels there is not other safe choice´) to choose big name vendors wich would look more reliable, thus reducing the vendor un-lock effect of OSS. There lies a more narrowed attack, mainly a at USA market level, which is none the less a very important one in terms of the market/business direction.

Of course they are trying to widen this ange by "convincing" Europe to apply sw patents too.

The enormous financial cost of the SCO hostilities spooked the likes of IBM, Google, Nokia, etc. into investing millions in the SFLC to address your very concerns.

The following *splendid* interview covers this and more generally undoes some of the FUD out there. It is with SFLC director Professor Eben Moglen a couple months ago: http://www.twit.tv/floss13
(Google supports the show and the quality is evident.)

"Of course they are trying to widen this ange by "convincing" Europe to apply sw patents too."

Not enough credit has been given to the various individuals who have held them at bay in Europe, the same people who have helped the EU to wake up about Microsoft. Some of these people are highly active developers working on interoperability and were among the first to publicly cast doubt on the MS/Novell "partnership".